away, ebbing, taking
flight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed, retreating
into the dark. The daily progress of things in Spring is for children,
who look close. They know the way of moss and the roots of ivy, they
breathe the breath of earth immediately, direct. They have a sense of
place, of persons, and of the past that may be remembered but cannot be
recaptured. Adult accustomed eyes cannot see what a child's eye sees of
the personality of a person; to the child the accidents of voice and look
are charged with separate and unique character. Such a sense of place as
he got in a day within some forest, or in a week by some lake, so that a
sound or odour can bring it back in after days, with a shock--even such a
sense of single personality does a little watchful girl get from the
accents, the turns of the head, the habits of the hands, the presence of
a woman. Not all places, nor all persons, are so quick with the
expression of themselves; the child knows the difference. As for places
that are so loaded, and that breathe so, the child discerns them
passionately.

A travelled child multiplies these memories and has them in their
variety. His heart has room for many places that have the spirit of
place. The glacier may be forgotten, but some little tract of pasture
that has taken wing to the head of a mountain valley, a field that has
soared up a pass unnamed, will become a memory, in time, sixty years old.
That is a fortunate child who has tasted country life in places far
apart, who has helped, followed the wheat to the threshing-floor of a
Swiss village, stumbled after a plough of Virgil's shape in remoter
Tuscan hills, and gleaned after a vintage. You cannot suggest pleasanter
memories than those of the vintage, for the day when the wine will be
old.

THE BARREN SHORE

It may be a disappointment to the children each year at play upon so many
beaches--even if they are but dimly aware of their lack--to find their
annual plaything to be not a real annual; an annual thing, indeed, to
them, for the arbitrary reason that they go down to it once a year, but
not annual in the vital and natural sense of the seasons, not waxing and
waning, not bearing, not turning that circle of the seasons whereof no
one knows which is the highest point and the secret and the ultimate
purpose, not recreated, not new, and not yielding to the child anything
raw and irregular to eat.

Sand castles are we